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Comment by braincat31415 | Hacker News Reader

I find Mandarin Chinese a lot easier than Russian.

I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.

It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.

Right but those Mandarin tones are pretty easy for an native english speaker to learn to say, they roll off the mouth easily.

Likewise, learning to speak the tone is just another grammar dimension, memorization.

Listening for tone is the hard part, but once you know enough grammar AND know the context of the sentence, it falls into place.

YMMV, also Cantonese is more difficult here (IMO).

I find Cantonese a lot easier on the ear. Unfortunately, nearly all the Cantonese I know is rude.

I find those Cantonese words ending in -p, -t, -k harsher than mellifluous Mandarin.

I'm not a great fan of the sibilant sounds in Mandarin. Which to be fair is pretty rich coming from an English speaker.

> I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.

Why would you want to? Pitch also provides connotations / emotions in Mandarin.

> It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue.

That will never happen. Your bad pronunciation can aggravate other problems, but if your sentence is otherwise good, ignoring the tones will still leave it fully intelligible.

(I once asked a student in a Chinese school whether a particular class wasn't occurring, and he responded "poss". After some confusion, he was frustrated that the pronunciation difference between "poss" and "pause" should make such a difference in communicating with an English speaker.

But of course, it doesn't. If "pause" were a valid way to respond to "is chemistry class happening today", I would have had no difficulty understanding "poss". His problem was in bad knowledge of the language, not bad pronunciation.

You appear to be making the same mistake here. If you try to communicate, and fail, that is not evidence that you are qualified to diagnose what the problem was.)

Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.

So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.

Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.

I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.

So Vietnamese is the “Danish” of East Asia it seems

Or the Golang of East Asia.

Personally I find Vietnamese and Chinese to be about the same difficulty overall, just not on the same areas.

Vietnamese is massively harder to pronounce with way less room for mistakes whereas reading is easier.

Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.

Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.

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